Project N.O.M.A.D.
Posted by ohyeahwell@reddit | preppers | View on Reddit | 39 comments
A buddy showed me Project NOMAD. I've set it up a few times now, pretty great! Especially if you can put it on a machine with an nvidia GPU. The built-in AI will still work (slowly) if you don't have a discrete GPU. With every resource downloaded it's roughly 600GB including the OS. I got just what I needed within 400GB with OS.
sadclam-damclas@reddit
Is there anyway to download all the data to a NAS on the same network?
ohyeahwell@reddit (OP)
Maybe mount the NAS then symlink /op/project-nomad/storage
There’s a project discord, they might have a more elegant conf solution?
sadclam-damclas@reddit
Thank you! I’ll give it a try.
dmonman@reddit
It does look good, but how needed are those recommended specs?
I have an old laptop but its only 8gb of memory and plenty of storage but seems high for it to recommend 32gb.
rockroad9@reddit
You can pick condensed versions of things and pick and choose what you want. You can customize it based on your storage space. I’m using about 20 gigabytes to get condensed Wikipedia,khan academy, and some maps. If you need some extra storage space you might be able to get a little external drive to give you some more wiggle room. But 8 gigs of offline information is better than nothing.
ohyeahwell@reddit (OP)
If you plan on running AI, you'll want all the RAM you can get. Non-AI doesn't seem to use much resources.
Give it a whirl. If it chugs on your machine no great loss.
jazzbiscuit@reddit
If they’d add a local library for your own files it would be just about perfect.
einzweitres@reddit
It does that. See the "RAG" part of the video.
jazzbiscuit@reddit
Not positive what “RAG” part of the video refers to, but if you mean the section about uploading and having the AI scan your document - that’s not what I’d like to see. I tried it with my car owners manual, it took long enough to process I ended up just walking away & when I came back later I discovered I couldn’t actually see the manual, I could only ask questions about it. Not very helpful if I need to see a graphic in the manual. Weirdly enough the AI gave me the “acceptable but not recommended” oil type as its answer to what type of oil my car needed & it took super long to come up with an answer at all. I want to be able to see my document, not ask AI & wait for its best guess - and hope it’s right.
legos_on_the_brain@reddit
That's the big problem with AI. Especially these super basic versions people are trying to run on laptop hardware. It's a cool concept, but having indexed and searchable documents is probably better still.
jazzbiscuit@reddit
Agreed. The basic N.O.M.A.D features are rock solid on my repurposed Dell Micro (i7, 32G ram, 1T SSD), but no dedicated video card means the AI is pretty much unusable. I can open a pdf on my phone, search for a term and jump right to it, N.O.M.A.D's AI (on my machine) is more "waaaaait fooooor iiiitttt....."
I suppose I sound like a whiner... Project N.O.M.A.D is sooooo close to being perfect for me. An actual document library would truly make it one stop shopping.
Sick_style@reddit
Yeah i was looking this kind of stuff and also started a topic.
https://www.reddit.com/r/prepping/s/XsKCNiu1b8
I have it on my spare computer, works great. I was looking for something portable preferably fits in mu iphone and works offline and i found post apoc ai. Also works great on field. Also maps.me a good app to have in case of blackout scenarios.
PeterTheWolf76@reddit
Looks cool, but still prefer Prepper Disk, especially if you are not tech savvy.
trichocereal117@reddit
You have to be really afraid of learning how to use computers for the pepper disk to make sense
ohyeahwell@reddit (OP)
Well, that or value your time. I could see the non-tech not finding the juice worth the squeeze.
I felt that way when I first got into Meshtastic/core hardware. I just didn’t care about the journey, I wanted turnkey results.
ohyeahwell@reddit (OP)
I suppose, if you aren't tech savvy.
Bigbadwolf2000@reddit
Very intriguing and I’ll check it out. I had built my own version a few months back. 6000 textbooks that get chunked and embedded before hand, instead of processing on the fly like this one. The advantage being a weak LLM can search thru it easier as most processing is done. If I had a better PC with 32gb RAM I’d probably pick this over my version. The content on this project is also way more impressive than mine
ohyeahwell@reddit (OP)
Same, I set this up on a demo machine first. Realized it eclipsed what I’d been doing, so I scrapped my setup.
sgtPresto@reddit
Will this work with Prepper Disk to index and reference that mass of information?
ohyeahwell@reddit (OP)
I’m sorry I don’t know anything about prepper disk. You could start a discussion on nomads GitHub?
RedBull_Honda@reddit
Silence brand
kridmus@reddit
Do not abuse this meme
ohyeahwell@reddit (OP)
I'm not associated with this project, and they don't sell anything. It's a free offline wiki/gutenberg/ai/map/khan academy internet-in-a-box github project. Not sure if you're a bot or a person.
Cizzzzle@reddit
From a toad who named themselves TWO brands. Redbull_Honda must have a great life being so above everyone. Those thought terminating quips are really working out for them!
Thank you for bringing this project up.
ohyeahwell@reddit (OP)
What does that mean?
Cunnilingusobsessed@reddit
I installed it on a spare mini PC I had collecting dust and it’s actually pretty neat. If you skip the AI stuff you can install it on an old or weak computer no problem. The full wiki download takes a while and they have a whole lot of additional stuff you can load it with. It’s actively being developed and updated so hopefully in the future we can get third party integration/ Module support (my wish), but over all a good prep for grid down/ offline information infrastructure
ohyeahwell@reddit (OP)
I put sdr++ on my bob machines, they should include that for sure. USB sdr are dead cheap.
ohyeahwell@reddit (OP)
Here's a review/walkthrough by zdnet.
I put it on an 11th gen gpd pocket 3 I keep in my car. Much easier with a deb-based distro, but you can compile.
I ran into a bug downloading the full wiki en_max zim. It works, but it doesn't look like it's making any progress. You can monitor the dir and watch the zim file grow, and ignore the failed status message in the dashboard. I saw it mentioned on their github, or discord or something. Can't find it now.
Cunnilingusobsessed@reddit
I think the full wiki link is bad. It’ll just keep trying and report ‘downloading’ without making any progress. I gave up on the full wiki and went with the full wiki - no pics and it finally downloaded
ohyeahwell@reddit (OP)
I thought so too but I kept du‘ing the zim dir and it was actually downloading slowly so I left it for a few days. Was coming down at like 3mbps.
Austechprep@reddit
This looks like an interesting project, thanks for sharing. It's always entertaining seeing useful technology prepping projects get shown here and get downvoted haha. This looks like it has inbuilt features to have a local LLM be your librarian so you can just ask it which medical books your should look at for a certain condition, which seems pretty useful to me.
exhilaration@reddit
I'm curious, will it recommend books that aren't necessarily in its collection or your possession? It's got some kind of index?
Austechprep@reddit
I've got a setup for audiobooks, and its not a great AI as its local on crap hardware, but it only has access to the stuff in my library and hasn't yet given me an answer thats not in my library, I can't say that in the future it might give me a romance novel instead of a sci-fi, it might happen one day haha.
ohyeahwell@reddit (OP)
Yes, totally! Even without AI this is far and away better than what I had cobbled together.
TheRealBunkerJohn@reddit
As a side note- this is actually a very useful tool. I've installed it on one of my spare rugged laptops, and you can set the AI (which is more of a librarian) to index additional PDF's. I can confirm it's 100% free and doesn't have any garbage ads or purchases.
ohyeahwell@reddit (OP)
Totally. Can you expand on the PDF thing? I have a whole cache I'd like to add. Firefox series, military manuals etc.
TheRealBunkerJohn@reddit
Sure thing! It only can process 5 at a time, so if you have hundreds (like I may or may not have,) it'll take ages, especially on a slow computer. But it's still an option.
DogsAreOurFriends@reddit
Internet in a box
ohyeahwell@reddit (OP)
Yeah its neat. On one of my other BoB machines I had a ton of pdf/epub/media and kiwkix content manually added. Which means I have to routinely download any updated zims etc.